Yellow Veil Pictures: The Ice Tower (2025) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures

French-Bosnian born provocateur Lucile Hadžihalilović, the writer-director behind Innocence, Evolution and Earwig as well as frequent collaborator with her husband Gaspar Noé having edited Carne and I Stand Alone as well as co-written Enter the Void, has been working under the radar without compromise or deterrent from her bold vision ever since the mid-1990s.  The first woman to win the Stockholm International Film Festival’s Bronze Horse Award for Best Film, she and Noé co-founded their own production company Les Cinémas de la Zone behind all of their films and further served as a producer on Lux Æterna as well as Vortex.  Further still Noé served as a cinematographer on two of her short films, making them a tag-team of enfant-terrible New French Extreme purveyors.  And yet neither visionary could be more different despite being so creatively entwined with Noé tending towards stroboscopic nihilism while Hadžihalilović is more interested in dreamlike ethereal and distinctly feminine discomfort in an almost Cronenbergian sense. 

 
Far more inaccessible than her husband, believe it or not, Hadžihalilović’s output remains enigmatic, disturbing and nebulously open to interpretation.  Bordering on near wordlessness with an eerie ambient soundscape leaning towards pin drop quiet, her latest film The Ice Tower being picked up by Yellow Veil Pictures for North American release is no less beguiling, mystical and confrontational if not her most ambitious work to date.  Co-written with Geoff Cox, drawing from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and featuring the most star power to date with Marion Cotillard in the lead, the French-German-Italian coproduction is a bit like a meta quasi-horror take on Disney’s Frozen by way of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with some World War III leanings concerning a stowaway hiding out on a film set who inadvertently becomes deeply involved with the movie including far reaching consequences.  At present the most synergistic, engaging and wonderous Hadžihalilović to date, it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Best Production Design and Best Film at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival. 

 
Sometime somewhere in the 1970s, Jeanne (Clara Pacini) is a runaway teen orphan hitchhiking her way to wherever she can seek refuge, dodging pervert cabbies in between sneaking into people’s apartments or hanging around ice skating rinks looking for a friend.  Her struggles to survive eventually land her on the film set of an adaptation of Hans Chistian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen with the mercurial and discreet actress Cristina (Marion Cotillard) under the direction of glassed intellectual Dino (Gaspar Noé).  Assuming the identity of Bianca from a stolen purse, Jeanne/Bianca finds herself caught red handed by Cristina who instead of throwing her out takes her under her wing as a possible stand-in for another actress struggling to get through her scenes.  From here an unspoken mutual admiration and fixation on one another grows with the lines between fairy tale, filmmaking and reality blurred together in such a way where neither we nor Jeanne/Bianca are sure of which side of the icy portal we’re on. 

 
Announced back in 2017 between Evolution and Earwig and her second time working with actress Marion Cotillard since Innocence, Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower isn’t a narrative so much as it is an experiential dream in the Lynchian or Buñuelian sense.  Often indistinct between fantasy and reality with the two sides intruding on one another with that Tarkovsky Stalker sense of creating suspense without any action involving numerous scenes of Clara Pacini walking through desolate corridors and alleyways or wintry streets, it is the kind of vibe and mood that soaks into the bones where the beginning, middle and end don’t seem to matter.  Time simply disappears as you’re lulled into an almost sleepwalking-like state of subconsciousness and scenes of the cast and crew watching dailies of The Snow Queen with Cotillard looking forlorn take on a fourth-wall-breaking metatextual sentiment.  Between Jonathan Ricquebourg’s sleepy and foggy but occasionally piercing scope 2.35:1 cinematography, the cacophony of subtle needle drops in an echo-spheric soundscape, experiencing The Ice Tower is like being in a dream that really isn’t sure if it wants to break out into a full-blown nightmare often wavering between the two extremes.

 
Touring the country in festivals followed by a streaming on-demand digital release, The Ice Tower crept out onto online platforms earlier this week and though its only been out for a couple of days its enigmatic mixture of subtle dread and Persona-like investigation of the gulf between femininity, fame and fantasy has a curious effect of being at once enchanting and unsettling.  Marion Cotillard and Clara Pacini play off of each other daringly and confidently while Gaspar Noé has fun playing a sleazy film director.  In Hadžihalilović’s oeuvre it is easily the most urgent and compulsively watchable of her works, moving faster with greater cohesiveness thanks to the dialogue and performances melding it all together.  While I’ve championed some of Hadžihalilović’s previous films before, they’re obviously difficult if not impenetrable works of pure cinema and won’t be to all tastes.  The Ice Tower, however, represents probably her best work yet, an eerie Bergmanesque meditation on the mirrored images and feelings mutually shared by the performer and the spectator.

--Andrew Kotwicki